Present Tense Machine

October 25, 2021
The playful and poignant latest from Øyehaug (Wait, Blink) unfurls the alternate realities that separate a mother and daughter. In 1998, Anna misreads the word “trädgård”—Swedish for “garden”—as the nonsense word “tärdgård,” and the slip-up sends her into a parallel universe. Her two-year-old daughter Laura has never existed, and she eventually gives birth to two new children, Peder and Elina. In the other universe, Laura grows up with no memory of Anna, and now an adult, she lives with her musician partner, Karl Peter, and is pregnant with her first child. Both women study literature, and they both sign up to take part in the same group piano concert of Satie’s “Vexations.” Yet while they’re sure something is missing from their lives, they fail to recall their bond. Øyehaug employs a metafictional narrator who frequently addresses the reader, noting that she’s writing while riding a bus and feeling dislocated, or reflecting on a Youtube video about astrophysics. Some of the mundane details of Anna’s, Laura’s, and the narrator’s lives slow the story, but the ruminations on existence and purpose consistently captivate. Ultimately, Øyehaug steers this to a wholly satisfying conclusion. Agent: Bjarne Buset, Gyldendal Norsk Forlag.

December 1, 2021
Released in 2018 in Norway, �yehaug's newest title is making its way to the U.S. thanks to Dickson's translation. An unknown narrator tells the story of Anna and Laura, a mother and daughter living in parallel universes. While watching two-year-old Laura in the garden one day, Anna misreads a word and suddenly Laura no longer exists in Anna's reality; every trace of her daughter, even in Anna's memory, is gone. Likewise, Anna no longer exists to Laura. �yehaug takes a metafiction approach; the unknown narrator knows all, frequently breaking the fourth wall ("This is the moment when the novel becomes a novel about two women who live in parallel universes"). Though the novel is hard to follow at times, �yehaug builds tension with run-on sentences and almost no paragraph breaks. Even with the unconventional writing style, the story is a page-turner. Some may find Present Tense Machine a little too fantastical, but fans of speculative fiction or the film Interstellar will be in reading heaven.

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Starred review from December 1, 2021
A slippery metafictional take on the peril and power of words and how identities fracture and compartmentalize across a lifetime, from one of the most exciting contemporary voices in international literature. In another masterful translation by Dickson of �yehaug's wily, mercurial prose, the author-translator team frolics across the multiverse to explore the rifts that open between, most especially, mothers and daughters but also spouses and ex-lovers and between self-perception and how others experience us. Laura, a 24-year-old literature teacher, is pregnant with her first child and increasingly anxious as her due date approaches: about the safety of their fire-trap flat, about fidelity (her own and her husband's), and about "a disconcerting feeling that everything is double." Anna, aged 44, mother of two children--that she knows of--is a writer working on her latest book and perennial obsession, a novel about the origins of language. Though Anna and Laura are unaware of each other's existence, they are, in fact, mother and daughter. Twenty-two years earlier, Anna sat reading Swedish poetry while supervising 2-year-old Laura pedaling her tricycle in the front yard. When Anna misread the word "tr�dg�rd" (garden) as the nonsensical "t�rdg�rd," it opened a parallel universe that Laura vanished into, entirely erased but for Anna's lasting sense that something important is missing, while in Laura's new universe, Anna has never existed at all. At the same time, Anna's husband, B�rd, returning from a job in the upper reaches of Norway to escape his attraction to another woman, split in two--one version in each universe--as he bought a newspaper and committed the same misreading. In the present, as Laura prepares for her own daughter's birth, Anna works on her novel, her narrator simultaneously writing the story we ourselves are reading, and navigates a relationship with her teenage daughter, Elina, that seems at times hardly more bridgeable than that with her lost daughter living in an alternate universe. With wry hyperbole, �yehaug plays out the effects one seemingly inconsequential mistake can have on our relationships, our selves, and the lives of the next generation. A perfect Mobius strip of a novel that playfully examines the creative and destructive potential of language.

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